A recent survey by Infonetics Research said that more than 50 percent of service provider respondents plan to deploy transparent caching or CDNs by 2014.
“The three-headed monster of video, mobility and the cloud is putting enormous pressure on operator networks, and throwing more routers at the problem isn’t the answer because traffic is rising much faster than equipment prices are falling,” said Michael Howard, Infonetics Research’s co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks. “This is driving a fundamental shift in how IP edge networks are being architected, with carriers combining their fixed and mobile networks for operational efficiencies and using caching and content delivery networks (CDNs) to move frequently used content closer to the consumer, speeding up response times and greatly reducing the amount of traffic crossing the network.
“Our survey shows the top three drivers for deploying CDNs are providing a better quality of experience for customers, network optimization, and reducing the cost and traffic load associated with delivering over-the-top (OTT) video content.”
Service providers rated Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper as the top service provider edge router and/or carrier Ethernet switch (CES) vendors, while Cisco and Juniper also topped the list of core router manufacturers.